Blockbuster boy Dermot Mulroney may no longer be Hollywood's best-kept secret.
Dermot Mulroney has one little fact about himself he'd like to clear up: The name is Mul-row-ney, not Mul-roo-ney. Beyond that, he has little use for the Hollywood public-relations machine: On this cloudless, summery April morning at the Hollywood Hills Coffee Shop, Mulroney would rather move on to more important things, like the pruning and fertilizing of roses. Yes, he allows, people sometimes confuse him with actor Dylan McDermott. So what? "Life is too short," he insists, "to get hung up on things like that." So it's back to roses: "Are you watering too much from the top?" he inquires about my own mildew-plagued plants. "Or are they just planted in the wrong place?"
Fresh from the set of My Best Friend's Wedding, in which he stars as an adorabley tough yet vulnerable groom-to-be caught between his fiancee (Cameron Diaz) and his platonic best friend (Julia Roberts), Mulroney defies the stereotype of a young Hollywood stud offscreen. Were he already the household-name heartthrob this movie stands to make him, you still might not recognize him here, in a baggy plaid shirt and tousers, joking with director friends on the street outside. The small scar above his lip, which makes the compact actor look poetically Stallone-like onscreen, is incidental when you meet him face-to-face, and unlike so many up-and-coming idols in this town, Mulroney never talks himself up. Instead, he philosophilzes at length about how musicians "bring the Jungian consciousness of music down to earth" and how lucky he's been to work with people he admires. Tom DiCillo, who directed 1995's uproariously surreal Living in Oblivion, which Mulroney co-produced and appeared in, is a "true auteur, a Woody Allen-in-the-making." (Mulroney has a small role in DiCillo's Box of Moonlight, opening this month, which also stars Caterhine Keener, mulroney's wife.) Keener, wo whom he's been married for eleven of his thirty-three years - an extraordinary achievement by Hollywood standards - "does amazing things with every role she gets," he says. "She has a lot to do with why I never feel that I'm missing something in life."
Not that he has missed anything: "I have as many opportunites as the next guy," says Mulroney, who's worked steadily since he arrived in L.A. in 1985 after graduating wit a degree in radio, TV, and film from Northwestern University. "But I also have a lot of time to do other things" - like learning to play the mandolin and performing with brother Kieran in the Low and Sweet Orchestra. Even if these blissful years of busy obscurity are drawing to a close, it's hard to imagine anything so fleeting as fame persuading Mulroney to forget his friends or give up his hobbies: "All of these things," he says, "I'd be doing them even if I were a banker."
